I've used Keyman for a few years now. Rarely is there a font problem in the 'normal' greek unicode range (your test case). But here's an example from the 'extended' greek unicode range - lower case alpha with acute.

ά

It looks to me, at least in 'Post a reply' preview, like a 'box' glyph. This is standard browser behavior when the character, decimal 8049 in this case, does not map to any glyph in the effective font.

Please note that I run my IE with a unicode font (Arial Unicode MS). I am regularly able to see greek glyphs, both in the normal and extended greek unicode ranges. But here, at least in preview, I do not.

Eureka wrote:Surely, if we can all install SPIONIC, then we could all install Gentium instead (it has all the accent markers).

Then all we’d need is for the font to be added to TextKit…

Hi,

Unless I am sorely mistaken - always a possibility - it's not that simple. The 'beauty' of SPIONIC is that it knows how to convert betacode (or nearly betacode) to the appropriate greek glyphs. That is, anyone using an ASCII text editor can create greek glyphs.

There is no such capability in the several Unicode fonts, e.g. Gentium. Gentium can properly show the glyph 'greek small alpha plus oxia' in response to the character 8049, but it can't convert the two ASCII characters a/ to the same glyph.

Try it yourself. Create a syntactically correct HTML file with this SPAN tag in the BODY:

<SPAN STYLE="font-family:spionic">a/</SPAN>

Open it in, say, IE. You should see alpha with an acute accent. Now change the tag to this:

<SPAN STYLE="font-family:gentium">a/</SPAN>

and reload the web page. You should see 'a/'.

In fine, not only is it a matter of having the right font, but of being able to generate the proper characters. NB: 'character' does not mean 'glyph'; it means the underlying numeric value which is mapped to a glyph by a font.

Yes, exactly. And that's my point. To effectively use a Unicode font, Textkit-ers would need to be able to enter Unicode data.

I suppose everyone could avail themselves of Keyman or something else like it. But I don't think everyone will be happy about this. I know there are some Unicode issues in older Windows (98, ME). Also, I don't know if this approach lends itself to non-Windows platforms.

Personally, I'd be much happier with a Unicode based solution. In fact, when I was new to Textkit I raised this very issue. But now it seems to me that SPIONIC is the simplest, one size fits all solution.

Isn't better to drop all these dasia and oxia etc. and use only one sign for the accent? Than you wouldn't have any problems with Unicode. I think, the ancient Greeks didn't use these dasia and oxia nonsense but it is a late invention of the Alexandrian grammarians.

It is much more useful to learn vocabulary and grammar, then waisting my time with pitches and how to pronounce them all. I haven't met anyone who could manage it, e.g. when to use circumflex and how to speak it. It's a totally waist of time and perhaps also money. That explains why the ancients didn't bother too much with that and soon dropped them all to one single sign for the stress accent. I myself often do not write even the stress accent.